


The proper way

by oceantears



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Best Friends, Crowley cares too much, Crowley fucks up, Crowley is a mess, Everything is Beautiful and Nothing Hurts, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Historical Accuracy, Historical Inaccuracy, Historical References, Hurt Crowley, Insecure Crowley (Good Omens), M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slight fluff, slight angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 15:20:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20391850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceantears/pseuds/oceantears
Summary: The many faults and downfalls of the demon Crowley.





	The proper way

**Author's Note:**

> English is not my first language, please tell me where I made mistakes!  
I might come back to this fic later and add to it, but for now, have this mess of Crowley's feelings, mixed with history.  
I do hope you'll enjoy it!! :)

It’s a hot, windy day and Crowley has sand in his eyes. His whole body is itching though if it is from the sand or the feelings inside him, he cannot tell. Aziraphale is standing next to him, unusually quiet. 

Just a few metres in front of them, a man is losing his life.

The man is screaming and crying as the nails pierce his skin, going through his arms and legs. The banging of the hammer sounds like misled thunder to Crowley’s ears.  
In front of them Jesus of Nazareth is being murdered and Crowley wonders if the Almighty is watching him. Can she see one of her children losing his life in such a terrible, gruesome way? Crowley hopes she can.

Next to him, Aziraphale shifts, his face a mask of terror and heartbreak. Crowley knows that this is not easy for him to watch, that unlike some of the humans standing around the cross, Aziraphale does not enjoy watching a man die. Crowley doesn’t, either.  
He knowsthat Aziraphale wants to say something, do something, but he also knows that the angel would never dare to disagree out loud with what the Almighty has ordered. It is Aziraphale’s greatest weakness and Crowley imagines that it might be his downfall, too. 

Crowley’s own downfall is caring too much, maybe. Like now, for example – he should not be here, at least not that close. He is meant to observe from afar, to cackle, maybe, and gloat over what Hell sees as a success. But he doesn’t because he has ever cared about doing things the proper way, or at least not as much as he should have.

He stands, watching as Jesus of Nazareth grows weaker, watches the fire in the man’s eyes wither and die. And he hears. He hears the people crying over the one they thought would salvage them, hears Jesus’ pained, tortured screams, hears Aziraphale sob quietly next to him. And he hears Jesus of Nazareth cry out, desperation evident in his voice. “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?”

Crowley wishes he had an answer to that. But he doesn’t and all he can do is stand by and watch as a man that did nothing but good is being brutally murdered.

\--------

The girl in front of him is crying, her back and hands are bloody. She is too young and her hair is cropped short, as if Crowley needed any other indicator of her class. The slave looks up as Crowley halts, her lips forming words too quietly for him to hear. Apologies, he is sure, mendicancies, anything that won’t make him hurt her like her Master apparently did.

Crowley _should_, he knows that. He is supposed to enjoy hurting people, torturing them, hear them begging for mercy. That he enjoys none of these things is just one of his many failures and shortcomings. He should hurt the girl, kick her while she is down, but he cannot bring himself to do that.

He does not speak as he bends down, ignoring her panicked sobs, her trembling. He touches her hands and her back softly, carefully. He cannot allow himself to perform a big miracle, his superiors have already reprimanded him once, but he can do enough to make the girl’s healing process easier, quicker.

After a moment, he straightens, leaving the girl in the hall. He cannot be seen being kind to her and her pain should subside in a few minutes either way. He leaves quickly, with purposeful strides. He will find the girl’s Master and if Hell is really lucky, they will be able to welcome another human in their midst soon. 

\--------

It has been a long time since Crowley has last seen his colleague. The angel has disappeared some hundred years ago, or maybe Crowley himself has, he isn’t all too sure. It doesn’t really matter, Crowley supposes. They will find their way back to one another somehow. Maybe when his job here is done, he can pay the angel a visit.  
Right now, he is in a dark alleyway in Europe somewhere. His order from Hell was phrased vaguely (“Punish the sinner and make him ours”) and Crowley was curious as to who exactly he would have to tempt and doom here. 

In front of him, there are three people, all men. Two of them are old – or at least what humans consider old - way above the third man’s age. Or boy, really. He cannot be any older than fifteen and even so, it is hard to tell with how skinny and pale he is. The first man, a big, bulky person holds the boy in a grip that must hurt, facing the third man. He is even older than the first, and wealthy from the looks of it – polished shoes, a new hat and silver cufflinks that shine whenever the street lamp’s light hits them. 

The boy is crying in between the two men and over it Crowley, who lurks in the shadow of a nearby building, can just make out the clanking sound of coins, mixed with the sound of rumpled paper notes being handed over. Sex work, then. Forced one, judging from the look of terror on the boy’s face. Crowley’s face darkens.

Even consensual prostitution, sex work, selling sex for money, whatever the humans call it now, are a crime and a sin in the human’s eyes. Demons – and angels, Crowley assumes – really couldn’t have cared less about it, morally speaking. But it made for an excellent excuse to doom people. As long as humans thought it to be turpitude, demons could condemn sex workers for their mere job – it was bizarre. And more than a little tasteless, in Crowley’s opinion. But a job was a job and Crowley would be blessed if he didn’t carry his out.

He watches as the man and the boy walk away, into yet another shady alley, the boy crying all the while. Crowley follows them silently, the proverbial monster in the dark. The other monster in this situation doesn’t bother hiding – he is standing right in the middle of the alley, forcing the sobbing boy to his knees.  
Crowley smiles, a sharp smile tinged with disgust and glee. Then he steps out of the shadows and goes to work.

  
  


When Crowley reports back to Hell three hours later, two souls in tow, he does not get the warm welcome he thinks he deserves. Instead he gets screamed at by at least three different demons that outrank him (_You imbecile idiot, the boy, you should have taken the boy that little whore, he’s a sinner, have you never heard of prostitution, not the men, what did you do to the men, you can’t even complete the simplest of tasks, Satan will hear about this-_) and sneered at by one that is beneath him. That one gets a nasty kick in the face quickly.

Apparently, Crowley has a very different understanding of “sin” than the rest of the demons do. Apparently, the boy was the sinner in the situation, not the men. Apparently, Crowley royally fucked up.

It doesn’t matter, muses Crowley while being screamed at by _yet another_ demon. He saved the boy and the men had gotten what they deserved. Consequences be damned.

\---------

Crepes. The damn fool had wanted to eat _Crepes._

Crowley had nearly lost it when he had heard Aziraphale explain what had even gotten him into this mess of a situation with the French. He should have left the angel to rot in that cell for a little longer, waiting for the guillotine, just to show him what he thought about the whole ordeal. It would have been the proper thing to do. But he didn’t and instead they have somehow ended up eating Crepes together, which are, much to Crowley’s dismay, delicious.

He watches as the angel, who was slowly becoming so much more than just a colleague to him, practically devours the food set in front of him. Crowley huffs. Really, he ought to have kept Aziraphale on the hook a bit longer; it would have been the proper thing to do. He was a demon, after all, and punishing an angel for his stupid ideas (no matter how light the punishment, because _of course_ Crowley would have rescued him eventually) should have been a dream come true. Making Aziraphale wait would have been the reasonable thing to do.

But as Crowley watches Aziraphale eat yet another Crepe, he thinks that maybe he doesn’t care about the doing things the proper way as much as he ought to. 

\-----------

It is raining, no, pouring, and Aziraphale _still_ insisted on going to the damn park. And now they’re here, standing in a deserted park and not even the damned ducks are anywhere in sight. Crowley kicks a stone with much more force than necessary and watches as Aziraphale looks up to the sky with a sickening adoring look in his eyes. Damned rainbows, blasted things they are. Aziraphale could have watched that garish thing from inside his flat, too, he didn’t have to make Crowley come with him to the park _in the pouring rain._

But that is what Crowley does now, apparently. Babysitting colleagues/acquaintances/frie- _angels_ on their strolls through the park. Crowley frowns at another stone that is next to his foot. When did his demonic life full of adventures and deadly sins turn into _this_?  
He is just about to kick the next stone when Aziraphale turns to smile at him. 

“Come to the cafe with me? The owner has been asking me to introduce my best friend to him for ages.”  
Crowley nearly chokes. Ah. Friends is what they are now, apparently. Huh.

He nods, too dumbfounded to give a proper answer and trails behind Aziraphale, who leads the way to this ominous cafe of his.  
The cafe is tiny, with just enough space for three tables but Aziraphale seems to enjoy talking to the owner (and Crowley resists the urge to throw up his hands in the air in exasperation, whenever the angel calls him a friend – he should _tempt_ angels, not befriend them) and the food is, admittedly, delicious.  
  
Crowley stabs his fork into his cake, ignoring Aziraphale’s animated chatter. A friend, the angel is his _friend_. What’s next, they’ll fall in love?

\---------

(Not quite. The next thing that happens is that Crowley asks for a way to commit suicide, basically. Or at least that’s how Aziraphale sees it. It doesn’t work out at first and then it does, but it is still a mess anyways, for a couple years after. He can’t even do that right, thinks Crowley, when he first holds the bottle of Holy Water in his hands, he cannot even do this right.)

\---------

Bur before that, there was Robert. Oh, how could Crowley forget Robert? Robert was an interesting one, at first. Crowley still isn’t sure where exactly he landed in the end – Heaven or Hell. He hasn’t kept up with the last thousand or so souls and does not know whether Robert Oppenheimer is in Heaven or Hell, or whether he is even dead already. (Crowley himself thinks he belongs to Hell, but he also knows that all the paperwork connected to Oppenheimer might be just a bit too much for the demons down there, and that they might give him over to Heaven just to save themselves some work.)

Robert was an interesting man, all along, and a joy to tempt, at first. Crowley didn’t exactly care about what the man and his team were working on, back then, he simply followed orders. That was a mistake, as it turned out. 

At first, Crowley saw it as an interesting change of scenery – Manhattan and then New Mexico sounded like a good combination. Oh, and it definitely was interesting, much like Robert Oppenheimer himself. Crowley talked to him for hours on end, tempted him at first, but as soon as he realised what exactly it was that Oppenheimer was so proudly talking about, he began doubting himself and his mission. It took him too long to realise, and when he did, it was almost too late. Robert was in New Mexico already, together with Crowley and “The Gadget”, a bomb that could destroy all life within 160 kilometres. Crowley himself couldn’t do anything else but watch, much like the next two times.

Crowley and Robert parted ways in 1945, and after the demon did whatever he could do to ensure that there was an _extensive_ file about Oppenheimer in Hell, he went to sleep. He had done his job after all – he had tempted Oppenheimer and his colleagues, had made them do terrible, terrible things. He had done what had been asked from him and now, he yearned for sleep, for some rest, for anything that would help him forget.

Crowley didn’t sleep for the rest of the century, like he had wanted to, but he did sleep long enough for Aziraphale to grow worried. He slept long enough for the uneasy feeling in his gut to lessen, slept long enough to stop asking himself why he was so wrong, why did not enjoy tempting a man like Oppenheimer, even if it had lead to him creating a weapon of mass destruction. He didn’t, however, sleep long enough to forget the terror he had felt when “The Gadget”, that first atomic bomb, had exploded and destroyed everything it could possibly reach.

\-----  
The wrong baby. It had been _the wrong baby._ Crowley was pretty sure that he had never, not once, fucked up _this_ badly. (So yes, maybe he should have stopped Shakespeare from writing 145 sonnets, and inventing clogged drains had maybe not been the best idea he ever had, and perhaps the one incident with Rome burning down all those years ago had also not been ideal, but this, _this_ was bad. Bad, even. With capital “B”.)

Because now, he had potentially misplaced Satan’s own son and had ended up with another brat, this one without diabolic powers, much to Crowley’s relief. The birthday party had been bad enough as it was.

Aziraphale seemed to think so, too, judging from the look of his cake-covered face. Crowley really wanted to kick some stones right now. He definitely fucked up this time.

(In the end, it works out. It works out like it always does – barely. Crowley and Aziraphale make it out alive and more or less unharmed and maybe, just maybe, Crowley didn’t fuck up as badly as he thought he did. Maybe not doing things the proper way wasn’t that bad, after all.)

(Though he must admit that he does do _some_ things right. Being friends with Aziraphale, for example, he thinks, as he clinks his glass with the angel’s at their table in the Ritz. Yes. That he does perfectly, thank you very much.)

( Even if he had to find his own ‘proper way’.)

**Author's Note:**

> Just if you didn't know: In ancient Greece, slaves usually had their hair cropped short and Robert Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist, who was the head of the so called Manhattan Project, which produced nuclear weapons. He was nicknamed "The father of the atomic bomb" and the Trinity Test was a test carried out in New Mexico (with Oppenheimer present), where the first atomic bomb, "The Gadget" was tested.  
Also, I really do not mean any disrespect to sex workers (unlike the demons, and I must add that children should never ever work as sex workers or be forced to do so, for obvious reasons!) and I apologise if it seemed that way. If anything I wrote came across as disrespectful, please tell me so I can fix it!!  
I hope you enjoyed! :)


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